December 21, 2008 Fourth Sunday after Advent (Joy)
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Luke 1:26-56
If you are feeling perplexed or anxious about something in your life, the story of
Mary may help calm and clarify your mind. If life has laid a burdensome task on you,
this story may help you bear it. If you have within you an undeveloped potential, some
gift, some measure of light that you could give to the world if only you knew how, this
story can help you find the way. And if you long for a joy that you can have despite all
your struggles, it may help to consider how Mary arrived at her joy, despite her
struggles.
I think our mind often plays a trick on us. I think we tend to compress the story
of Mary to be even shorter than it is. We see the angel come and next thing we know
Mary is singing the Magnificat, a miraculous, instantaneous, immaculate re-conception
of her life because she is suddenly pregnant with Jesus. But there is more to the story
than that, and we need to put the crucial middle back into it, because that is where all
the usefulness is for our own spiritual journeys toward fulfillment and joy.
First, it is important not to rush past the beginning. Mary has an experience that
leaves her perplexed and afraid. She is human in this. She is like us. Hearing the news
that we have found favor with God and have been chosen to bear God’s child to the
world can send us into the confused and entangled feelings of perplexity and fear,
whether that child be flesh and blood or some other creative or productive labor. A
calling from God can trigger fierce resistance in us. Jonah argued with God about his
calling. Moses argued about his. Notice that Mary argues, too. She argues that she is a
virgin. This can’t be happening.
There is no reason to believe that Mary feels anything like joy at this point in the
story. Nothing Gabriel has said would lessen anyone’s perplexity or fear, especially his
final statement that “Nothing is impossible with God.” That is not comforting when it
means that God is about to turn your entire life upside down and make it a scandal.
So what happens next is surprising, even shocking. Mary responds with one of
the most beautiful lines in all scripture. She says, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord;
let it be with me according to your word.”
Tradition refers to this prayer as the Fiat mihi, which is Latin for “Let it be with
me.” Let it be is the first clear step Mary takes toward joy, though she is still a long way
from the Magnificat. As soon as she says “let it be,” the angel departs.
There is then a gap of some days in the story, and we can only imagine what
Mary went through. There must have been much pain and grief as she broke the news to
Joseph and worked to adjust her whole life to the new reality. To say “let it be” is one
thing, but to live with it is another. To live with let it be means to accept and even
embrace the challenges and hardships that come with whatever we are accepting. It is to
become vulnerable. It opens us to suffering, but at the same time it opens us to the flow
of the Holy Spirit through us, and to all that makes for joy.
I think of the story I shared earlier this fall about a man named Hank who
received the fearful news that he had a fast moving, incurable cancer. He did all he
could to fight his dying, and for a while his denial made him look heroic. But then with
the help of a good friend who spoke the truth to him, he went through a change. He let
go and said let it be, and he fell through his fear into love. He became pregnant with the
presence of a luminous spirit that moved everyone around him in his last days.
This is one of the qualities of joy that the former member of this congregation
and Harvard Professor of Psychology, George Vaillant, talks about in his new book,
Spiritual Evolution: A Scientific Defense of Faith. He points out that joy and happiness
are two different things. He would call happiness the feeling Hank had when he was
designing a program for beating his unbeatable cancer—doing his exercises, eating his
special diet. Happiness is an exciting feeling where the heart beats faster and we feel
distracted from fear or grief or pain. But when we let up on whatever is making us
happy, when we lie in bed awake at night and stare up into the truth, happiness cannot
hold a candle to the darkness of perplexity or fear.
Joy is far more powerful than happiness. Joy flows around and through
suffering. You may not feel happy at the funeral of someone close to you, but it is
possible to feel joy from the remembered love and the gathered community of family
and friends. Joy does not work by distraction or denial, it requires the attitude of open
vulnerability to the truth, of let it be. Joy does not make the heart pump faster, it slows
down and calms the heart. Vaillant observes that unlike happiness, which scientists can
locate in one part of the brain, joy spans and realigns our entire being. It rewires the
circuits of our brain, and so it changes our perception of reality. It opens our spiritual
eyes.
George Vaillant quotes an Eskimo shaman who describes his journey from let it
be to all-out joy. The shaman writes:
I sought solitude, and here I soon became very melancholy. I would sometimes
fall to weeping and feel unhappy without knowing why. Then, for no reason, all
would suddenly be changed; and I felt a great, inexplicable joy, a joy so
powerful that I could not restrain it, but had to break into song, a mighty song,
with only room for the one word: joy, joy! And I had to use the full strength of
my voice. And then in the midst of such a fit of mysterious and overwhelming
delight I became a shaman, not knowing myself how it came about. But I was a
shaman. I could see and hear in a totally different way. (p 120)
Shamans and Christian saints and mystics of all faiths all testify to the wisdom of
saying “let it be.” That is how we enter into a place where God can change us from the
inside out and lead us to joy. We can imagine that this had been happening to Mary
when the story picks back up. It says, “In those days Mary set out and went with haste”
to her cousin Elizabeth, who was also bearing a miracle child of God, John the Baptist.
Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit when she saw Mary, and said, “Blessed are you
among women….As soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb
leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be fulfillment of what
was spoken to her by the Lord.
This is the essential final step into joy. It is to be connected, to enter a
community with our gift, to enter into the sharing and recognition of blessedness.
Vaillant writes in his book that two of the evolutionary reasons why the human mind
developed the capacity for joy were first to foster community, and second to encourage
us to bring to birth the gifts, talents and callings God has given us. The joy that humans
find in community and in our callings keeps us coming back to them even when they are
challenging or sources of pain. Civilization probably could not survive without this joy.
Certainly a church could not.
Mary left her solitude, just as the shaman left his, and came into community,
bearing her gift. She heard Elizabeth say blessed are you for saying “let it be,” for
having the faith that what God spoke would be fulfilled.
That is when, finally, Mary’s own joy erupts, and she sings out with full voice,
“My soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God, my savior.”
So if you are longing for joy in the midst of grief or pain or any manner of
perplexity or fear, or if you have the light of Christ in you waiting for you to give it birth
through the fulfillment of your calling and the using of your God-given gifts, here is the
good news. The path to joy lies before us all. It begins not through escape or denial or
distraction, but through saying in the midst of the perplexity and pain of life, “let it be.”
This is not to say let it be to evil, or let it be to what must be opposed for the sake
of love or justice or peace. The let it be is to our presence in these particular stressful
circumstances. The let it be is to whatever God is calling us to do in them. It may be to
give birth to a child who will scatter the proud in the thoughts of their hearts and bring
down the powerful from their thrones. It may be to fight for civil rights, or fight for our
life. Or it may mean, like Hank facing his immanent death, that we stop fighting and
open to the final gifts of grace God gives in this life. Sometimes let it be means simply
to wait patiently for the next step to become apparent.
We cannot know exactly where any given moment is leading. As far as joy is
concerned, it does not matter. Joy does not depend on success or approval or pleasure.
Joy comes into even the hardest of times if we do three things: if we open our hearts to
accept God’s loving presence within them; and if we consent to the role God seems to
be asking us to play; and if we enter into loving community with those around us.
That is why this church is a community of joy. We each come here out of our
own struggles with perplexity and fear, we come with grief or pain or doubt, and our
coming here makes us vulnerable in that good way that opens us like Mary to say “let it
be” to our calling. Equally importantly, being a part of this congregation enables us to
hear others say to us, “blessed are you.” We don’t say exactly that, of course, but how
often after the service do we feel how blessed and beloved a person is and communicate
it with a smile or a listening heart or a pat on the back? And that is joy. That is the very
joy Jesus talked about when he said that when we abide in love, his joy will be in us and
our joy will be complete.
Here is an exercise to feel how joy can rise in community even through grief or
pain. If you have been in this congregation for a while, think about one of those
departed saints among us who was blessed among women—think about Lillian Vaughan
or Gladys Boyd or Maud van Norden or Virginia Anderson—someone you miss.
Imagine if by some miracle she walked through this door right now. That is joy. Or if
you never knew them, imagine the Christmas dinner table that had at it the people you
loved most deeply as a child, people who are gone now. Imagine if you could sit there
again, even for just five minutes in their presence. That is joy.
Let us now pray a prayer preparing us for this joy that we may feel after the
service today as we engage with this loving community full of blessed women, children
and men. Let us prepare ourselves for joy by accepting our place here, saying as Mary
did, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” Let
us pray in silence…
Sermon 12/21/2008